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Hudsons to Swoon Over

ADMIRER Bruce Smith, a Hudson man, with his 54 Super Jet, left, and 51 Pacemaker.Credit
Stewart Cairns for The New York Times

“AH, man!” said Dean Moriarty. “That Hudson goes!”

Moriarty, based on the novelist Jack Kerouac’s ex-con hipster pal Neal Cassady, was the fast-talking, fast-driving protagonist of “On the Road.” In 1949, the two friends made one of their many road trips together, blasting south at 70 miles an hour from New York to New Orleans and back in a brand new Hudson.

That same year, Bruce Smith was going in the same direction, in the same model car. Mr. Smith, then a 16-year- old high school student, accompanied his father on the trip from their home in upstate New York to Miami. “My father was an educator,” Mr. Smith said. “He was also a high-speed driver. That’s why he got into Hudsons.”

Ah, the Hudson: it’s a name that still makes car enthusiasts swoon. Considered by some to be one of the finest driving machines ever built in America, the 1949 model was a gem, featuring its patented “step-down” design, so-called because passengers actually stepped down into their seats, as the floor was surrounded by the perimeter of the car’s frame. This gave the vehicle a stylish, streamlined profile that, combined with its powerful six- and eight-cylinder engines, made it strong, stable and faster than any nonsports car on the road at the time. It was also comfortable, said the Hudson historian Jack Miller of Ypsilanti’s Automotive Heritage Museum in Michigan, and “an absolutely fantastic car for cross-country driving.”

Today there are an estimated 5,000 Hudson collectors in North America. Like Mr. Smith, a retired high school social-studies teacher who owns three vintage models, they are fiercely loyal to a nameplate that has been defunct for half a century. The Hudson Motor Car Company, founded in 1909, was a small, innovative manufacturer in an era of Big Three dominance.

“Hudson was always ahead of its time,” said Ryan Ankney, who founded a Web site for fans, hudsoncollector.com. “These cars sort of attract a certain type of people. A lot of them are free spirits.”

Photo

Bruce Smith's 49 Super 6 convertible.Credit
Stewart Cairns for The New York Times

“On the Road” took the notion of free-spiritedness to new, Benzedrine-fueled heights. So perhaps it is no surprise that the Hudson is the car that has become most associated with the novel, which was published in 1957 — the same year the last Hudson rolled off the assembly line. On July 14, as part of its summer-long 50th anniversary celebration of the book, the author’s hometown, Lowell, Mass., put on a Hudson car show. It featured 24 antique Hudsons “like the one Kerouac drove cross-country,” a news release on the event said.

Strictly speaking, Kerouac rarely, if ever, drove the Hudson, or any car. That was the job of Cassady, who claimed to have developed his prowess behind the wheel as an adolescent car thief in his native Denver. Still, Cassady’s biographer isn’t so sure it mattered to him whether he was driving a shiny new Hudson Super Six or a beat-up station wagon. “Any car would do,” Graham Vickers, a co-author of “Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero,” said in an e-mail message. “My impression was not that he was a car maven, just a desperado with a changeable car rather than a changeable horse.”

“On the Road” reveals that both Kerouac and Cassady drove all sorts of vehicles. At one point, Kerouac — as his alter ego, Sal Paradise, the narrator — travels from California to New York in the very symbol of upper-class conformity, a Cadillac. Kerouac describes the Cassady-driven Caddie as an “imperial boat”: “The magnificent car made the wind roar; made the plains unfold like a roll of paper; cast hot tar from itself with indifference.”

It is hard to imagine a group of antique-Cadillac enthusiasts getting that jazzed up about their vehicles today, or holding a competition to see which one can still make “the wind roar” the most. But Hudson enthusiasts do. Every year at the national collector’s meet, a prize is awarded to the person who drives the longest distance to the event in a Hudson.

Mr. Smith, who took the road trip ages ago with his father, drove his 1951 Hudson Pacemaker from his home in East Greenbush, N.Y., to the 2006 convention in Kearney, Neb. It took him and a friend two days, six hours. “We cruised right along with everyone else on the Interstate,” Mr. Smith said. Despite the 1,350-mile journey, they lost the prize by about 50 miles to another Hudson fan who drove from Florida.